Realignment, Southern Strategy Style 2
The BooMan sums up the realignment of the Republican Party. The assessment is harsh. It is also accurate.
It is Nixon’s odious Southern strategy come to fruition.
With that lone exception, all the prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers have aligned with the conservative movement.
Yankee Republicanism is dead. All we have is the reactionary right aligned with a bunch a greedheads. You won’t find an inch of daylight between Pat Robertson and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and Paul Wolfowitz or Grover Norquist and Mitt Romney. We have the worst of all worlds.
I would not have said “aligned with the conservative movement.”
In these modern times, “prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers” are the conservative movement.
The Southern strategy has consumed its creators.
September 26, 2012 at 10:31 am
The VOP, Vile Ol’ Party/ You should read Taibbi’s rundown at Rollling Stone. He maintains the election should never have been close because ol’ Syphilis is the very example of the thing almost everyone despises. He blames it on the fecklessness of the Democratic Party, which still has a whole lot of wan and lousy pols in it who, like the VOP, believe in nothing but Wall St., and Obama’s weakness. I agree but he doesn’t describe the Southern Strategy, an oversight, on harvesting and uniting all the bubbling under white bigotry in the land, the glowing rage over the guy in office which can’t be just brushed off to the fringes anymore. And it’s blown up in their faces, as you say, with a candidate who is an odious lampoon, who can’t be put in front of a camera or allowed near people because he’ll always say something insulting and/or patronizing, a guy who can’t go through a day without always informing people, in some way, that they are below him.
September 26, 2012 at 3:44 pm
I have seen that column.
I do think he underestimates the effects of the Republicans’ relentless playing of the terrorist card under Bush and the 30-year campaign, starting with Reagan, to brand caring for the poor and working class as somehow unAmerican.
Democrats have persisted in expecting Republicans to play by the rules, while Republicans have repeatedly punched below the belt. Enough of that, and you get punch-drunk.
It is good to see Democrats start to fight back and hear the lamentations of Republicans: “He hit me back first!”